CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
While recognisably a John Grant album, Boy From Michigan brings on board something new and unprecedented – an outside producer. Welcome, Cate Le Bon. Among her previous production credits are Deerhoof and Tim Presley, whom she’s collaborated with on an album. As these and her own releases attest, she’s not going to steer anyone towards the mainstream.For Grant’s fifth solo set, the follow-up to 2018’s Love Is Magic, Le Bon appears to have helped give Grant his most integrated sound in years, bringing a balance which last surfaced on much of 2013’s second solo album Pale Green Ghosts. Although Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Rounding out a decade of personal success – beginning with his Cannes Jury Prize-winning The Puppetmaster (1993), followed by a best director award for Good Men, Good Women (1995) – the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien travelled to the Japanese harbour city of Hirado as part of his research for Flowers of Shanghai (1998). An unexpected work, the film emerged out of the ashes of a failed project to shoot a biopic of Zheng Chenggong, otherwise known as Koxinga, a Chinese Ming loyalist who fought against the emergent Qing Dynasty. Set at the close Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Hailing from Benin and based in Paris since she was 23, Angélique Kidjo can sing in five languages, has collaborated with an A-list festival line-up of global stars ranging from Alicia Keys and Philip Glass to Herbie Hancock and Peter Gabriel, and had her first albums released by Island, after being spotted by label head Chris Blackwell. Each of them was studded with guest artists, including Branford Marsalis and Gilberto Gil, and featuring covers such as Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child”.She has won Grammys, travelled widely as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and set up a foundation to empower Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The first release that brought folk-pop duo Kings of Convenience to prominence outside of their native Norway was their Live in a Room EP, released in 2000. Recorded, as the title suggests, with a minimum of fuss, the cuts include pre-song count-ins, real-life room reverb and the occasional shriek of a string as a barre chord hurriedly settled into its seat. These moments defined the recordings almost as much as the notes themselves - acoustic music with an electric atmosphere.More than 20 years later, Eirik Glambek Bøe and Erlend Øye have returned with Peace or Love, their first album since Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Broken Hearts and Beauty Sleep has been five years coming. It’s only a mini-album but is spiced with a range of guests, and offers an array of musical styles, the whole sound ably built with alt-tronic producer FaltyDL. The press release tells us Blanco has recently come out of a calming three year relationship, but the album is neither morose nor studiedly reflective. It feels more like a sequel to the playful 2016 debut Mykki. Blanco may be a key transgender presence in hip hop, but rather than preaching, they prefer to entertain, and are not afraid of choruses.The one song that does seem Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After listening to Miracle on repeat, the impression which lingers is that its creator has assimilated a lot of music. First and third album Big Star, Magnetic Fields, The Left Banke, the non-rock side of Abbey Road, Nilsson, Lloyd Cole, Plush, Emitt Rhodes, the poppy side of Field Music, a smidge of Elliott Smith, the swoon of Brian Wilson. Yet the result is a coherent song cycle with its own flavour. Classic, yet fresh. Familiar, but different.The creator of this musically erudite album is Tom McClung, a former member of the high-concept Manchester band Wu Lyf. They hid their identities and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Lake Mungo (2008) is a dread-laden Australian Gothic thriller that masquerades as a straight-faced documentary.It’s also an analysis of grief that questions who or what it's for; a disquisition on representation that emphasises our psychological need to be deceived by simulated images instead of accepting what’s patently real; and a meditation on the spirit of place and collapsibility of time. Anyone chilled and perplexed by the 1921 photo that concludes The Shining should find Lake Mungo intoxicating – so, too, fans of David Lynch’s oneiric inquiries into moral decay in the suburbs Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Back in dark days of the first lockdown when she was birthing her new album, Joan Armatrading was the subject of a TV documentary called, not surprisingly, Me, Myself, I, a fascinating look at a career now almost 50 years old. It was a powerful story of a woman who has always known her own mind, musically and otherwise, and who has always engaged with the media on her own terms and who has never ceded control of her music or her career to others. “I think it’s possible to be yourself and get on in pop music”, she has said. So she has proved.Kate Bush was probably the most original of the Read more ...
mark.kidel
The German director Robert Wiene is best known for The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920), perhaps the most influential piece of expressionist cinema. He's not as well known as F. W. Murnau or Fritz Lang, but he deserves to be in the same league. The Hands of Orlac (1924), made in Austria rather than Germany, is a very fine example of a cinema haunted by the violence and death of the First World War, and containing within it both seeds of fascist aesthetics and the darkness that characterises film noir.Based on a novel by the French author Maurice Renard, this intense and dramatic film Read more ...
joe.muggs
Well this is bleak. Seven studio albums, three live albums, two compilation albums, one remix album, three EPs, 33 singles, 23 music videos, 120 million sales and streams well into the tens of billions seem to have completely erased what personality Maroon 5 might ever have had. Not that they’ve ever been a band to frighten the horses, of course: their giga-success has come through comfortably cruising along the middle of the road, cannily adopting zeitgeisty sounds and giving guest spots to current ascendent names, without ever letting them overwhelm their essentially solid soft rock Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
At no point in their near-30-year career have “shy” or “retiring” been adjectives you could apply to Garbage - and yet, on this their seventh record, the Scottish-American rockers go to places that they never have before. With songs taking on capitalism, climate change, misogyny, racism and police brutality, No Gods No Masters is a no holds barred, politically charged firecracker of a record - one which is as brutal, messy and vulnerable as the human condition.Despite its songs pre-dating the pandemic - the band’s last day of recording together was in March 2020, before the world went into Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The latest album from Marina Diamandis, her fifth, is a startling explosion of vim and attitude. It mingles speeding, wordy, indie-tinted dance-pop bangers, tilting at all manner of contemporary ills, with sudden moments of broken-hearted piano-led contemplation. When she last appeared two years ago, it was with the lengthy Love + Fear album, Paloma Faith-ish songs whose tastefulness masked real character. Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land, on the other hand, is packed with plenty of juice and surprises.It opens with the title track, an electro-glam-pop stomper midway between Britney Spears’ “ Read more ...